Articles

Bat Wings Haven’t Changed

Bat wings haven’t changed, according to a report in ScienceNOW 17 April 2006. A team of biologists led by Karen Sears and Lee Niswander of the University of Colorado are researching the origin of bat flight. Bats’ wings are made of a membrane supported by three long forelimb digits, like very elongated fingers. The researchers studied the wings of four fossil bats including "the earliest known fossil bat, a 50 million-year-old specimen", along with 10 living species, and concluded that "the length of the three digits relative to body size, has not changed in the course of evolution. This suggests that the bat wing evolved suddenly and very quickly." They then compared the development of bat embryos with mice embryos to see how their fingers grew. They found the digits on mice and bats were initially similar, but bat fingers rapidly elongated due to stimulation from a bone growth promoting protein named Bmp2. They found more Bmp2 in bats than in mice and concluded that "an upregulation of Bmp2 might have powered elongation of the three digits in an ancestor to the bat 50 million or more years ago, helping to make winged flight possible."

Editorial Comment: Note the difference between the actual observations and the explanations of the observations. The facts are that all known fossil bats and living bats have the same wing structure, and this editor has seen the oldest known fossil bat and agrees with Sears observations totally. The fossil and living bats are good evidence that bats have reproduced after their kind, just as Genesis says they were created to do. This is regardless of how long ago you think bats first got fossilised. There are no known exceptions to this, thus such a conclusion is related to the actual evidence that exists. The claim that bats evolved rapidly from an unknown ancestor that has left no evidence in the fossil record, is an evolutionist belief held in spite of the evidence, not because of it.

The embryological study simply confirms that it takes more Bmp2 bone growth protein to make long fingers than short ones, and bat embryos are programmed to produce more. It does not explain where the programming came from, or even where the Bmp2 gene came from. It makes more sense to believe that mice and bats have the right amount of Bmp2 protein for their needs because a creative designer programmed the gene controls appropriately for each animal. (Ref. embryology, development, mammals)